Джеймс Глик - Genius - The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

from some students in Yugoslavia; a photograph of Michel e with her cel o; some black-and-white pictures of the aurora borealis; his deep leather recliner; a sketch he had made of Dirac; a van painted with chocolate-brown Feynman diagrams. On February 3 he entered the UCLA Medical Center again.

Doctors in the intensive care unit discovered a ruptured duodenal ulcer. They administered antibiotics. But his remaining kidney had failed. One round of dialysis was performed, with little effect. Feynman refused the further dialysis that might have prolonged his life for weeks or months. He told Michel e calmly, “I’m going to die,” in a tone that said: I have decided. He was watched and guarded now by the three women who had loved him longest: Gweneth, Joan, and his cousin Frances Lewine, who had lived with him in the house in Far Rockaway. Morphine for pain and an oxygen tube were their last concessions to medicine. The doctors said it would take about five days.

He had watched one death before—trying to be scientific, observing the descent into coma and the sporadic breathing, imagining the brain clouding as it was starved of oxygen. He had anticipated his own—toying with the release of consciousness in dark sensory-deprivation tanks, tel ing a friend that he had now taught people most of the good stuff he knew, and making his peace with bottomless nature:

You see, one thing is, I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it’s much more

interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I’m not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don’t know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we’re here… .

I don’t have to know an answer. I don’t feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it real y is as far as I can tel . It doesn’t frighten me.

He drifted toward unconsciousness. His eyes dimmed.

Speech became an exertion. Gweneth watched as he drew himself together, prepared a phrase, and released it: “I’d hate to die twice. It’s so boring.” After that, he tried to communicate by shifting his head or squeezing the hand that clasped his. Shortly before midnight on February 15, 1988, his body gasped for air that the oxygen tube could not provide, and his space in the world closed. An imprint remained: what he knew; how he knew.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I never met Feynman. I’ve relied on the published (and semipublished) record; on his own accumulation of personal letters, notes to himself, and other documents, released to me in 1988 by Gweneth Howarth Feynman; on letters shared by other family members and friends; on his office files and other documents stored in the California Institute of Technology Archives in Pasadena; on early material col ected at the Niels Bohr Library of the American Institute of Physics in New York. I obtained recently declassified notebooks and papers from the archives of Los Alamos National Laboratory. Other material came from the libraries and manuscript col ections of the fol owing institutions: the American Philosophical Society (papers of H. D. Smyth and J. A. Wheeler); the Brooklyn Historical Society; Cornel University (papers of H. A. Bethe); Far Rockaway High School; Harvard University; the Library of Congress

(papers

of

J.

R.

Oppenheimer);

the

Massachusetts

Institute

of

Technology;

Princeton

University; Rockefel er University; and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.

The leading physicists who play the largest roles in this book agreed to provide their own recol ections in interviews that sometimes extended over many sessions: Hans Bethe, Freeman Dyson, Murray Gel -Mann, Julian Schwinger,

Victor Weisskopf, John Archibald Wheeler, and Robert R.

Wilson.

Feynman’s own voice is everywhere in his published work, of course, and toward the end of his life, wherever he went, tape recorders and video cameras seemed to be running. But several interviews of Feynman by historians and others were especial y valuable. The deepest and most comprehensive—a central resource for anyone studying Feynman—is an oral history of many hundreds of pages conducted by Charles Weiner for the American Institute of Physics in 1966 and 1973; I used Feynman’s copy of the transcript, with his handwritten corrections and comments. I also consulted the AIP’s oral-history interviews with Bethe, Dyson, Wil iam A. Fowler, Werner Heisenberg, Philip Morrison, and others. The physicist and historian Silvan S.

Schweber kindly shared the tape of his revealing 1980

interview on the development of quantum electrodynamics and on Feynman’s style of visualization. Lil ian Hoddeson conducted a useful interview of Feynman for her technical history of Los Alamos. Robert Crease gave me the transcript of an interview for his and Charles Mann’s The Second Creation . Christopher Sykes gave me access to the uncut interview he conducted for what became the 1981

BBC-TV production, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out .

Sali Ann Kriegsman gave me her transcript of Feynman’s recol ections of Far Rockaway.

Ralph Leighton, who drew from Feynman the reminiscences that became Surely You’re Joking, Mr.

Feynman! and What Do You Care What Other People Think? , generously provided the original tapes of these interviews over nearly a decade. These are the stories that Feynman retold and refined over his lifetime—mostly accurate, but strongly filtered. I have tried not to lean on them too heavily, for reasons that I hope emerge in the text.

Feynman’s family members also spoke with me at length: Gweneth, Joan, Carl, and Michel e Feynman and Frances Lewine. Helen J. Tuck, his secretary of many years, shared her invaluable memories and perceptive comments.

Among the many other col eagues, students, friends, and observers of Feynman who helped me by submitting to interviews or providing written recol ections—and in some cases copies of letters and diary pages—were Jan Anbjørn, Robert Bacher, Michel Baranger, Barry Barish, Henry H. Barschal , Mary Louise Bel , Rose Bethe, Jerry Bishop, James Bjorken, Peter A. Carruthers, Robert F.

Christy, Michael Cohen, Sidney Coleman, Monarch L.

Cutler, Predrag Cvitanović, Cecile DeWitt-Morette, Russel J. Donnel y, Sidney Drel , Leonard Eisenbud, Timothy Ferris, Richard D. Field, Michael E. Fisher, Evelyn Frank, Steven Frautschi, Edward Fredkin, Sheldon Clashow, Marvin Goldberger, David Goodstein, Frances R. (Rose McSherry) Graham, Wil iam R. Graham, Jules Greenbaum, Bruce Gregory, W. Conyers Herring, Simeon Hutner, Albert Hibbs, Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gerald Holton, John L.

Joseph, Daniel Kevles, Sándor J. Kovács, Donald J.

Kutyna, Janijoy La Bel e, Leo Lavatel i, Ralph Leighton,

Charles Lifer, Leite Lopes, Edward Maisel, Anne Tilghman Wilson Marks, Robert E. Marshak, Leonard Mautner, Robert M. May, Wil iam H. McLel an, Carver Mead, Nicholas Metropolis, Maurice A. Meyer, Philip Morrison, Masako Ohnuki, Paul Olum, Abraham Pais, David Park, John Polkinghorne, Burton Richter, John S. Rigden, Michael Riordan, Daniel Robbins, Matthew Sands, David Sanger, J. Robert Schrieffer, Theodore Schultz, Al Seckel, Barry Simon, Cyril Stanley Smith, Norris Parker Smith, Novera H. Spector, Mil ard Susman, Kip S. Thome, Yung-Su Tsai, John Tukey, Tom van Sant, Dorothy Walker, Robert L. Walker, Steven Weinberg, Charles Weiner, Theodore A. Welton, Arthur S. Wightman, Jane Wilson, Stephen Wolfram, and George Zweig.

Two indispensable histories of twentieth-century physics are Kevles, The Physicists , and Pais, Inward Bound .